Do you know the importance of an online monitoring program in maintaining an organization’s reputation?
A business risks losing 22 percent of business when potential customers find one negative article on the first page of their search results. Three negative ones on the first page can cause that number to jump to 59.2 percent.
Having an online monitoring program in place is essential in today’s digital world. It is an early warning system to a brewing crisis.
Do you have an idea of how your business appears when someone “Googles” it? Or do you know what people are saying about it in conversations taking place on Facebook Pages or Twitter?
Search engines and social media networks index then share what people say about you and your brand from comments in blogs to tweets. What appears in the search engines or on Wikipedia can often define you and your organization. Regardless if it is correct or not.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know what people are saying right now about you?
As a small business owner, you would want real-time insight into what people are saying about you, your organization, services, and products. It is an intelligent business practice.
Having the up-to-date intelligence will allow you to see if problems are developing as well as opportunities. With online monitoring programs, you can get essential insights real-time about what people are saying about you or your brand allowing you to be more proactive in managing reputation threats and potential reputation meltdowns which could lead into organizational crisis. Monitoring will help you understand your customers’ experiences ensuring that customer satisfaction met and exceeded. It will allow you to keep tabs on competitors. And it will show industry trends developing.
Before you initiate a listening or online monitoring program, conduct a communications assessment to see how your organization is communicating to internal and external stakeholders. The evaluation includes any printed materials, website, e-newsletters, media articles, and social media. You can do that by conducting a SWOT analysis, which involves listing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
When you conduct the analysis, ask yourself three questions regarding your communication practices:
Is this meeting our business goals?
Why are we doing this?
Where are our customers getting their information?
Once you answer those questions and conduct your SWOT analysis, you can decide what KPIs are relevant. To effectively monitor social media, you have to decide what you want to know. From there, you can set up an online monitoring program based on those KPIs. Reasons for listening could be for customer service, research, competitive analysis, and reputation management.
Without an active listening program, it could cost your business due to unknown threats and unseen opportunities.
